I’ve been wanting to write about the current war in Gaza for a while now, but it’s been hard to find the words for what I wanted to say. But today I started writing a letter to a friend, and found that in addressing a single person I was able to find words. So this is an epistolary post, unedited from what I originally meant to send in an email to one friend who asked what I thought.

I frequently feel as if half the world wants this to be a black-and-white situation where one party is innocent and angelic and the other party is evil and demonic, whereas the truth is far more complex. Truth, after all, is always complex, because truth is never singular.

You know, the problem is that there are just as many opinions among the Palestinians as there are among the Israelis. (Have you read Bitter Lemons? If not, I’d recommend it.) Today in Ha’aretz there’s a huge 1/4 page advertisement from an Auschwitz survivor, expressing shock and outrage at the international community for wanting a cease-fire. And I have a friend in Jerusalem, who lost both of her parents at Auschwitz, who is generally pretty centrist, and desperately wants a cease-fire so no more Israeli soldiers or Palestinian children get killed. If even 92-year old Jewish women Holocaust survivors can have varying opinions, then any larger demographic will never have consensus!

I see that there had to be some kind of military response against Hamas at this point. No question. But I also think that Israel has created the necessity itself – this could have been avoided if the withdrawal from Gaza was not “unilateral,” if Gaza hadn’t been turned into a ghetto, and if anyone on either side had been honestly engaged in a peace process over the last 15 years. Instead, I hear more and more Palestinians and Israelis being quoted saying things like “they just don’t want peace – they will never allow us to live in peace” and sliding further and further towards fear and helplessness. And I don’t see where it’s ever going to end.

And in the end, I’m not Israeli or Palestinian, I’m not planning to live here permanently, and frankly I don’t think the rest of the world has the right to be meddling in Middle East politics. If the US didn’t provide such massive funding to Israel, I think the settlements would never have grown past a few nutcases smoking pot on their hilltops. If the US hadn’t been using the Afghanis against the Russians in the Cold War, Al Qaida wouldn’t have become such a huge threat, and if the Arab world could just grow up already and accept that Israel isn’t going anywhere then Hezbollah and Hamas would have stayed focused on providing social services, and their violent activities would have dwindled and perhaps disappeared.

But I still do feel some responsibility to talk about what’s going on here, and try to convince others that neither side is perfectly innocent, that we all shoulder some degree of responsibility for the massive failures that brought us to this new war. Because there are so many people who want slogans and bumper stickers and easily stated positions, and frankly I think that slogans can be just as destructive as qassams and fighter jets. If I hear “we stand with S’derot” one more time, I’m going to be sick. What does that mean? Is the speaker planning to join the IDF, or physically move to S’derot? Of course not. If I hear “solidarity with Gaza” one more time, same thing. Is the speaker moving to Rafah, or joining the UN convoys to bring medical supplies to Gaza City hospitals? Of course not. It’s too easy to shout pointless nonsense when one’s own life is not actually bound up in the conflict. It’s much harder to bind one’s own life to the conflict and live a position, rather than safely posting it on Facebook and feeling self-righteous.

From my perspective, the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis living in the towns near Gaza have all been screwed by both Hamas and Israel. From my perspective, everyone on both sides of the Gazan border who thinks that violent retaliation to provocation is a good idea is endangering millions of lives. Everyone in this part of the world has reason to feel afraid, angry, and vengeful, but no number of reasons will ever justify further violence.

And this war is doing nothing but increasing support for Hamas among the Palestinians and increasing support for the right-wing parties among Israelis, further polarizing the population and whipping up the flames of hatred all around. There is no such thing as justified violence. What Hamas has been doing to their own people and to the residents of southern Israel is unjustified. What the Israeli government has done to their own people and to the residents of Gaza is unjustified.

So I’m trying very hard to not get sucked into the path of repeating useless statistics that don’t actually increase anyone’s understanding of what’s going on. I’m trying very hard to read as many opinions as possible on this war and the terrible history that brought us to this day, in the hopes that I can understand better the repeating patterns that perpetuate violence. And I’m hoping that somewhere in Israel and somewhere in Palestine, there are people who are much smarter than I am who will rise from this mess with clear visions of how to break this awful cycle and begin to seriously work for peace.

i’m very much with you on the usefulness of understanding the political complexities among palestinians & israelis. but appealing to those complexities to think through the current war is, it seems to me, at best mildly problematic and at worst evasive.

the history and complexities are indeed crucial to thinking about the longterm struggle for justice in the eastern mediterranean. but what’s going on now in gaza is a ‘conflict’ the way a drive-by shooting is a boxing match.

dismissing the hundredfold-to-thousandfold differences in palestinian and israeli deaths and injuries as “useless statistics” is to ignore the actual lived reality of what’s happening. which is a massacre.

or, more accurately, in the words of deputy defense minister matan vilnai, “a bigger shoah”. vilnai was describing to the Guardian newspaper last february what his government’s intentions were towards gaza. that week they’d killed over a hundred palestinians. this week it’s been nearly seven times that.

vilnai’s description does indeed fit what his government’s done since february: imprison 1.5 million people with the aim of creating “a human catastrophe” (in the wrods of prof. arnon sofer, in the jerusalem Post, describing the siege plans he was developing in 2004), and then begin killing them. we know how that story ends; we honor the jews who responded to similar imprisonment and starvation with armed self-defense in warsaw, vilna, lodz, and the other ghettos, and condemn the judenrats who urged restraint.

when the israeli government is referring to its aim as “a shoah” and pursuing a policy of mass starvation followed by massacre, neither of your 92-year-olds has an opinion that’s in touch with any notion of justice. one is supporting actions that are explicitly presented as genocidal; the other is asking us to equate the world’s 10th or 20th best-funded army and its targets rather than insisting that that army stop bombing the world’s most densely populated city.

complexity is important. but in relation to palestine it’s often an alibi for inaction.

you don’t need to know anything about who’s involved or their history to know that when an army kills over six hundred people it’s spent months besieging, it’s wrong. and it needs to end. now.

Daniel, I think you’re making an assumption about which statistics I’m considering pointless. My apologies that I didn’t address this issue, but as I said, it was the text of a letter to an individual. I was responding to the fact that dozens of my friends in Israel and beyond currently have a “Qassam count” on their Facebook status lines, as if to indicate that the number of Qasssams falling on southern Israel is either not well known, or is justification for the war Israel is waging on Gaza. And it’s neither. It’s a useless statistic that takes into account no human suffering at all. So yes, it is very worthwhile to see that 600+ people have died in Gaza while only 8 or so Israelis have died as a result. That’s not a pointless statistic, and my apologies if I in any way implied that it was. Especially given that two of the “Israeli” civilian dead were Israeli Arabs, who only in death are treated by the Israeli government as being “Israelis.” In the end, my biggest concern is that no brief slogan can encompass the magnitude of the current horrible situation, and it’s destructive to try to reduce it to a black and white situation. Hamas’s actions are also severely damaging to the Palestinians, which is why several of my Palestinian friends in the West Bank aren’t too upset about seeing them take a beating. Several others, of course, disagree. But the important thing is to allow all of their voices to exist, and bring them into respectful conversation with each other. Then we might actually get somewhere.

I really liked your post Marissa! It is very true that the situation is not black and white and I feel like some people on facebook though definetly not all only look at the fact that there are hundreds of rockets being shot into Southern Israel and think that the war is completely justifiable in every means because Israel is defending itself.

i’m sorry for misinterpreting you about statistics – you didn’t make clear whether you were dismissing all statistics as meaningless, and of course i agree with you about the “qassam count” absurdities.

however, you write:

no brief slogan can encompass the magnitude of the current horrible situation, and it’s destructive to try to reduce it to a black and white situation.

this is where i disagree with you. certainly, the massive political differences among palestinians and among israelis are important to any reasonable thinking about the long and medium term in the eastern mediterranean.

but the current situation (meaning: the israeli war on gaza) is in fact as close to black and white as its possible to get outside of a silent movie. there simply isn’t a response consistent with any notion of justice, human rights, or even international law which doesn’t begin with the simple declaration – a “brief slogan”, if you will – that the israeli government must cease its massacre immediately.

sure, that sentence can’t in any way give voice to the spectacle of four children, too weak to stand, lying alongside their mother’s corpse, or any of the other horrors of the khurbn gaza, but it doesn’t need to. all it needs to do is state clearly and concisely the most basic demand of any human conscience faced with the actions of the israeli government.

when bombs and tanks are slaughtering people, there simply is no possibility for “respectful conversation” between those targeted and those killing them to lead anywhere but to a larger pile of corpses.